SYNOPSIS: A special police assassin is recruited to hunt down four rogue biologically engineered humans known as replicants and kill them.

CONCEPT IN RELATION TO THE VIEWER: The age old story of creation, do the creators have responsibility for what they create? What does a life form owe it’s maker. Los Angeles is very dark and wet in 2019.

PROS AND CONS: I don’t know how many times I have seen this film. This is supposedly the last modification to the original film and is intended to show Ridley Scott’s ideal unfolding of the story.

This is one of the few films I saw as a young college student when it first came out in the late 1970s. I was so impressed with the film, that I walked out of the theater and promptly bought another tickets and watched it again. It was that profound at the time.

Watching it now. almost 40 years later, it is like walking through a familiar dream where I am able to look for all the details that I may have missed during previous viewings. The changes to this version are subtle. The most notable difference is that the tone of the piece is much darker, depressing and intimate.

Gone is the voiceover that the studio put in over Scott’s objections. The studio felt that the plot might be a bit too hard for some viewers to figure out without help from the voice inside Deckard’s head. Without the voiceover, Deckard becomes a much more sullen and introverted character. He is more of an unsympathetic killing machine.

Another noticeable, albeit subtle, change in this version of the film is the sound and music. It is heightened and more intense in this version, or at least it seemed to be. In Ridley Scott’s version of 2019 L.A., there is always mechanical sound in the background of very scene and it is always raining. There is a deep sound ambience to the entire film that gives a sense of intimacy and isolation.

There has been a lot of speculation regarding some of the odd clues that Scott leaves in the film, specifically the unicorn vision that Deckard has and the tiny origami unicorn that Gaff leaves on the landing outside the elevator at the end of the film. In the original cut of the film, Deckard’s voice over indicates that Rachel has no termination date, yet in this final version of the film, he does not know this, so he has no idea of how long Rachel may live. Depressing indeed.

To read an overview of this project, check out the initial post for this series.